Prompt: How does the character(s) relationship to the past contribute to the work as a whole?

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Woven rhythmically in a perpetual dance, life begins with a single thread and ends with a web, no one bearing likeness to another—yet in man it is also a serpent that sheds and is reborn. Unlike the web, the serpent is always there, feeding on the darkness in men’s hearts, and whispering in his ear. It is said that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions and Walter M. Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz pays homage to such a pilgrimage. Broken into three parts, spanning almost two millennia, it contains no single protagonist, but chronicles the exploits of the monks of the Order of Leibowitz, an isolated subset of the surviving Catholic church, and their gambit to preserve the past, thus containing several significant characters. But in preserving the past, these Leibowitzian monks have unknowingly played a role in destroying their future, as well as humanity’s, serving as a biting testament to our species’ inherent flaws.

Delving into the history of the story, set in an alternate time, man had reached the pinnacle of its capabilities thus far, and in doing so it had unearthed the means to bring about its own destruction: annexed from the depths of Hell itself, nuclear weapons bore their curse upon the world. Those who had led the expedition feared its power and condemned those whose ambitions sought it, but Caesar—the tyrant in every generation—knew better than to listen to the ramblings of lesser men, and struck his enemies in a wanton display of lust. In a matter of seconds, what had taken Mother Nature eons to subtly guide and patiently foster was destroyed. Conceived in this hellfire, the world was born anew—this time encased in ash. But the curse remained, leaving the remnants of the progeny of Adam prey to the lurking “Fallout demons” who scoured the land, carrying with them the marks of death, and Miller chronicled, “From fear, the hate was born. And the hate said: …Let us make a holocaust of those who wrought this crime, together with their hirelings and their wise men; burning, let them perish, and all their works, their names, and even their memories…Let us make a great Simplification, and then the world shall begin again.” (Miller p.62) And so, as nature intends, after the initial burst of lightning, this cry of thunder bellowed throughout the centuries, staining them its bloodshed, and, eventually, the storm passed.

Exploring the times after this age of darkness, one finds that humanity is finally able to rebuild, and the monks continue their vocation to preserve, keeping man from fully collapsing into its self-induced ignorance. In this tedium though, they are not unlike their ancestors in Northern Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire, who stoked the embers of a nearly forgotten culture and body of knowledge during the dark ages, but could not comprehend the subjects of their labor. Unbeknownst to the monks, an inevitable scientific revolution was brewing and would soon clash with their theological conservatism, tying in a reoccurring theme. This begs the question of the role of the church in scientific progress, since science does not constrain itself with the dealings of the moral or metaphysical, only with what pertains to the furthering of logical understanding. But where is the line to be drawn, when those hiding under the banner of advancement, violate ethics? In this paradigm, without a strong sense of righteousness to regulate the impulses of human nature we are condemned to self-destruction, since nothing is above experimenting, including life. Pandora’s Box has been opened, and without any way to quell its fury, we are left only to limit the inevitable destruction. The abbot of the monks during this time, Dom Paulo, gave a thoughtful insight, “Men must fumble awhile with error to separate it from truth, I think—as long as they don’t seize the error hungrily because it has a sweeter taste,” (Miller p.233) warning us not to give in to petty temptation, and to find the truth within ourselves, to free ourselves. Alas, as the second nuclear age was birthed, such warnings fell upon deaf ears, and the world was again teetering on the precipice of disaster; one it fully comprehended. Finding a shade of reason behind the consequences of the first nuclear war, using Charles Darwin’s ubiquitously applicable rebuttal, “The chief cause of our natural unwillingness to admit… is that we are always slow in admitting any great change in which we do not see the intermediate steps,” (Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man); man had not yet seen a billion bodies and the horrors of a radiation that was coolly indifferent, but now there was no excuse.

This rapid ascent out of darkness to recover man’s damning heritage was fully realized in the final section of the novel, rightly named Fiat Voluntas Tua—Let Thy Will be Done, which, ironically, is a part of The Lord’s Prayer interpreted as a divine invitation to sculpt Earth into a veritable Heaven—to foster righteousness among man. Predictably, the monks’ role in this futuristic life, after fulfilling their vocation and paving the way for modern society, is one of the scribes’; a perennial monotony accounting the unrestrained perversion of technology. Man was now in a position for creation due to their endeavors instead of rediscovery, but the more it advanced, the greater the discontent became. The final abbot of the Order of Leibowitz, Dom Zerchi—whose last name juxtaposed to the first abbot, Dom Arkos, signifies a masked reference to alpha and omega—reflected upon the situation musing, “When the world was in darkness and wretchedness, it could believe in perfection and yearn for it. But when the world became bright with reason and riches, it began to sense the narrowness of the needle’s eye and that rankled for a world no longer to believe and yearn.” (Miller p.285) This is the Catch-22 of man: we who strive to build a cheap imitation of Eden merely to satisfy our hopes, just as easily tear it down because it can never quite be more than a shadow of the original. We are the serpent that sheds and is reborn—rebuilding from the ashes of our false paradise, only to repeat the cycle. Man, without the steadying hand of an outside entity, was made to destroy itself.

These monks and the Church they represented, bounded by ethics, could have been the moral authority to check and balance secular leaders, but they themselves were only men. Walter M. Miller dares the reader to wonder if we can truly live in harmony with ourselves, and with technology’s unimpeded growth, the lines between fiction and future become blurred.